Archive for May, 2017

More than a million people have registered to vote for the first time on 8 June. We ask new voters how they feel about having their say

On a Wednesday evening in Walsall, near Birmingham, people from a local temple were handing out chips and beans to anyone who was homeless, or hungry, or both. They expected to reach 100 meals within an hour; four years ago, it was more like 20.

In the queue, one twentysomething told me his benefits money had already run out, leaving him penniless until next Monday. I asked him about the election. “I don’t really know about politics, if I’m honest,” he said. “As soon as I hear Brexit, I switch off.” But you’re living out the consequences of politics. “I know,” he replied. “I’m living in poverty. I’m not an idiot. I’m struggling.” He had never voted before, but probably would this time – even if he hadn’t yet chosen a party: “My dad’s saying Conservative, my mum’s saying Labour.”

The referendum is definitely affecting my vote. It was such a shock, like waking up with a very bad hangover

I’m really trying to focus on the policies rather than people

I feel like it’s the old versus the young sometimes, and they’re not voting for what I would want for my future

Our urban centres are bearing the brunt of the latest austerity cuts. Not since the Thatcher era has a Tory government dared to pit town against country this cynically

‘There’s nobody representing us,” said the thirtysomething man killing time on a side street in Handsworth, Birmingham. Amid the weekday bustle on nearby Soho Road, a smattering of people told me they would be voting Labour, there was irate talk about the Conservatives’ record on immigration, and a few British-Asian former Brexit supporters said they now regretted voting for the leave side, what with prices creeping up and the uncertainties facing small business people. But to a greater extent than anywhere I’ve visited over the past three weeks, the election felt irrelevant to ordinary life.

In the third part of their election roadtrip, John Harris and John Domokos spend time in Birmingham and Walsall – the kind of urban, multiracial communities that the politics of Brexit has suddenly pushed to the sidelines. They find Theresa May’s hardline immigration stance and cuts to English language classes sparking anger and frustration, but also find Labour supporters attracted by her ‘strong and stable’ pitch for their votes

As their election tour continues, John Harris and John Domokos watch the Labour party lose in Lancashire. Public services may have been ravaged by austerity, but the Conservatives appear to be on a roll. As children’s centres, libraries and buses are axed, even a passionate local anti-cuts campaigner cannot stop the blue surge. So what’s going on?

Theresa May’s projected election victory will be pyrrhic: the country has no clue where it is heading

Can we now hail this general election as the strangest British contest in living memory? We have a prime minister who affected to go into the campaign full of vim and vigour, but now seems to recoil from the absolute basics of what electioneering entails. If your people shut journalists from a big regional website into a small room for fear they might video something as banal as a visit to a manufacturer of diving equipment – as Theresa May’s campaign apparently did in Cornwall this week – you are surely in a very odd place.